Can Matt Damon solve our refugee policy dilemma?

Andrew Smith considers what a Hollywood film about a space station that becomes home to the globe's elite can teach us about Australia's policy towards asylum seekers.

When you watch the trailer for Neill Blomkamp's new sci-fi action film Elysium it is difficult not to note the parallels to Australia's asylum seeker policy.

The film envisages a not-too-distant future in which the global elite opt to create a safe and prosperous space station, Elysium, away from the dangers of a polluted and overpopulated Earth. Significant resources are invested into preventing unauthorised Earthlings from reaching Elysium.

To watch the film is to witness the lived experience (or Hollywood interpretation) of our policy trajectory from the perspective of the Other.

The bipartisan process of globalisation spurs the increasing flow of capital, goods and especially people across borders. But while the nation state remains the epicentre of sovereignty and democracy, it will always remain at odds with the process of globalisation.

Nation states will only forgo minimal control of their sovereignty for the sake of the nation's economic and security interests.

Meanwhile, national security as a concept and as a practice has quietly expanded well beyond the realms of military and security intelligence. Organised criminals, asylum seekers, 'hacktivists', and now every other nation's citizens are deemed potential threats to national security, worthy of flagging and monitoring.

The NSA leaks reveal the scope and sophisticated analysis of that monitoring. This is ostensibly the process of prosperous nation states ensuring that while the prosperous flows of globalisation (capital, cheap goods, skilled labour) remain open, the unintended flows (disease, transnational crime, unskilled people) are restricted.

We can experience the process ourselves as travellers – our Western passports give us rapid and fairly unfettered access to living and working in other countries while our Asian neighbours remain restricted from such access.

The uncertainty that stems from globalisation has the perverse consequence of encouraging democracies to elect politicians offering certainty through hardline security policies. Elysium is in fact the teased out endpoint of this logic.

As the security services of the Elysium space station shoot down unauthorised ships flying toward the prosperous nation, Australian minds wander to the inevitable militarisation of our own borders: the three-star general in charge of towing, buying or perhaps even one day shooting boats trudging towards Christmas Island.

The more a nation demands certainty amid complexity, the more authoritarian it becomes.

Put simply, the rapid expansion of counter-terrorism laws and funding throughout the West following 9/11 is our reaction against the wild zone's 'asymmetric threat' tactics to gain more recognition, sovereignty and equity.

In this context, we may view the ever-expanding notion of national security as the reinterpretation of anything from the wild zones that requires constant attention lest the integrity and prosperity of the safe zones are breached.

The trajectory looks set from here. Bipartisan support for increasingly authoritarian responses to the 'wild' boat people arriving on our shores sets up an increasing militarisation toward any threats to our relative safety. The prosperous West must violently fight back against the increasing tide of 'bad' globalisation while ensuring the increased capital that flows from outsourcing our waste, unskilled labour and indignity to developing nations.

On that note, we can also see our sprawling mega-cities of Sydney and Melbourne as the externalising of the 'less productive' into the relatively disadvantaged, disconnected outer suburbs. This is the Brave New World.

So what should we do in response to this challenge? Are there any alternatives to this trajectory? Did the Occupy movement provide any real and sustainable alternatives?

At the end of Elysium (spoiler alert!), Earth's citizens are deemed legal citizens of the space station and therefore automatically deserving of advanced medical treatment from the robotic medical specialists.

At once, this strikes me as a utopian vision which lacks a reflection of the difficult consequences that come along with suddenly reassigning everyone in the wild zone as legal citizens of the safe zone.

Healthcare costs would surely soar beyond budgetary capacity. Disease, unemployment and crime would spike as the new citizens of Elysium still found themselves locked out of capital and quality of life the elite had already accrued. Social unrest might spill over to uncontrollable levels.

In this regard, there should be a risk analysis in our conversation about reasonable ceiling levels of Australian refugee and migration intakes, as well as the investment of services and measures required to protect social cohesion.

So what might an ethical and sustainable balance look like? Increasing our humanitarian refugee intake to 20,000 per year hasn't disrupted the social fabric so far. How about 50,000?

The present availability of social services means that we would be better able to achieve similar intakes with less social disruption than we saw during the southern Vietnamese refugee intake of the 70s and 80s. Is this the appropriate response?

A counter-point might be to state that no matter how many refugees or immigrants we allow per year, there will always be more. There will undoubtedly always be 'wild zones' in the developing world beyond our borders.

Besides, Australia is already taking a reasonable proportion of the global intake. And by increasing our intake, we are increasing the risks to Australia's quality of life, sustainability and domestic security.

We may see social cohesion fall as competition for unskilled labour and subsequent crime levels rose. These are arguments I find difficult to reject outright.

So is there any way out?

Perhaps increasing capital flows to the developing world (a là philanthropic business loans) would reduce relative poverty and stave off this increasing gap between the elites and the rest. Perhaps there is a way to legislate a more equitable globalisation.

Because militarising our borders will not stop the flow of people, as America has noted. And electing politicians with ever-increasing hardline policies will not ensure our security or actually remove our uncertainty.

But finding an alternative will require nation states and their democracies to think well beyond one's own borders and recognise that national security is also related to global security; to a shared security.

Above all, our policies must ensure that the so-called wild zones must be treated with increasing, not decreasing, levels of dignity and equity.

Andrew Smith is political researcher who writes about counter-terrorism, national security and its effects on society. View his full profile here.